John Coltrane’s Handwritten Outline for His Masterpiece A Love Supreme

The great jazz saxophone player John Coltrane was born 87 years ago today.

To mark the occasion we present this rare document from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History: Coltrane’s handwritten outline of his groundbreaking jazz composition A Love Supreme.

Recorded in December of 1964 and released in 1965, A Love Supreme
is Coltrane’s personal declaration of his faith in God and his
awareness of being on a spiritual path.

“No road is an easy one,” writes
Coltrane in a prayer at the bottom of his own liner notes for the album, “but they all go back to God.”

If you click the image above and examine a larger copy of the
manuscript, you will notice that Coltrane has written the same sentiment
at the bottom of the page. “All paths lead to God.”

The piece is made
up of a progression of four suites. The names for each section are not
on the manuscript, but Coltrane eventually called them
“Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance” and “Psalms.”

In the manuscript, Coltrane writes that the “A Love Supreme” motif
should be “played in all keys together.”

In the recording of
“Acknowledgement,” Coltrane indeed repeats the basic theme near the end
in all keys, as if he were consciously exhausting every path. As jazz
historian Lewis Porter, author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music, tells NPR in the piece below:

Coltrane more or less finished his
improvisation, and he just starts playing the “Love Supreme” motif, but
he changes the key another time, another time, another time. This is
something very unusual. It’s not the way he usually improvises. It’s not
really improvised. It’s something that he’s doing. And if you actually
follow it through, he ends up playing this little “Love Supreme” theme
in all 12 possible keys. To me, he’s giving you a message here.

In section IV of the manuscript, for the part later named “Psalms,”
Coltrane writes that the piece is a “musical recitation of prayer by
horn,” and is an “attempt to reach transcendent level with orchestra
rising harmonies to a level of blissful stability at the end.”

Indeed,
in the same NPR piece which you can listen to below, Rev. Franzo Wayne
King of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco
describes how his congregation one day discovered that Coltrane’s
playing corresponds directly to his prayer at the bottom of the liner
notes.

In addition to Porter and King, NPR’s Eric Westervelt interviews
pianist McCoy Tyner, the last surviving member of Coltrane’s quartet.
The 13-minute piece, “The Story of ‘A Love Supreme,’” is a fascinating
overview of one of the great monuments of jazz.